Doris Lessing's rewriting of her parents' past

It may prove difficult to find this book in a bookshop, for surely no bookseller will know in which section to shelve it. Alfred and Emily is a deeply odd hybrid.

The first part is labelled 'a novella' and is a fictional biography of Doris Lessing's parents, Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh. It is not, however, an imaginative reconstruction of their lives: more intriguingly, it is an attempt to posit what their lives might have been like, 'if there had been no World War One'.

The second part of the book tells the story of their lives as they really were. Both were wrecked in different ways by the war. Shrapnel shattered her father's leg and, with a wooden one, he struggled to cope on their farm in Rhodesia, until forced by diabetes to quit. Her mother was a nurse whose 'great love', a doctor, was drowned; and 'she did not recover from that loss'.

There is something fiercely obsessive underlying this extremely strange book. Its origins go back a long, long way: even as an adolescent, as Lessing revealed in her autobiography, Under My Skin, she would run raging into the bush, 'sick and angry and in a blaze with frustrated pity...

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"These two people, these sick and half crazy people, my parents - it was the war, it was the First World War, that was what had done them in. For years I kept bright in my mind, like scenes from a film, what they would have been without that war.'

In this fragmented novella-cum-biography, the long-brewing 'elemental' animus is once again Lessing's relationship with her parents, and most of all with her mother. 'I hated my mother', she states:

'I can remember that emotion from the start, which it is easy to date by the birth of my brother. Those bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands: I was afraid of them and of her, but more of her unconscious strengths."

Those who have read Under My Skin will find this familiar. In it she recalls, 'what I remember is hard, bundling hands, impatient arms, and her voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me.'

I fully expected, therefore, to be more gripped by the first, fictional half of Alfred and Emily than by the bitty re-hash offered in the second. Yet as a work of fiction in its own right, the novella is oddly ungripping. Alfred marries a plump wife, Betsy, and has children; Emily marries her 'true love' but is not happy with him, is widowed and throws her energies into good works.

The adolescent running into the bush used physical distance to escape; the grown novelist affects a studied emotional distance from her characters. The problem is that this rarely allows them to engage a reader's sympathies or interest as fictional creations. The prose is kept deliberately flat, mock-factual: 'At this point Daisy came down to visit her parents, partly because Emily was there. She arrived at supper time and the four went to the table... '

Fragmented nuggets of fact, real and invented, are strung together, and none of the characters is strong enough to bind them. Alfred is less interesting than Emily, both come (as in real life) from emotionally broken families. Alfred hates his mother, who favours his brother and does not love him; but it is not explored here how this affects him, perhaps because he was not the parent Lessing wished as a child to 'discard'.

Tellingly, one of the few interesting moments, when one is let into Alfred's thoughts, is a moment of unhappiness: when his wife is pregnant, he realises 'his dancing days are over', and hates Betsy's 'great stomach'.

This jealousy of an unborn child (or rather of unborn children: Betsy is carrying twins, male, therefore entirely unlike Doris, who in this version of events cannot ever be born) is intriguing because one cannot tell where the sudden little eddy of twisted emotion comes from: is it an overflow of bitterness from the author, who feels suddenly and obscurely that her father would have been happier without her?

Emily in the novella is more complex; but the phases of her life - motherless, athletic and rebellious girl; disappointed doctor's wife, running musical evenings; energetic educator - remain bitty, uncohesive. 'Nothing fits, as if she were not one woman but several,' Lessing remarks of her real mother; but imagination does not heal the rifts in the invented character.

Perhaps this is because her daughter/creator still cannot feel she has 'much in common with her' - except for a few moments of disturbingly sudden emotional overlap.

In the second half of the book, the writing is as fragmented as the first, but it is vivid, turbulent, fresh with raw emotion, even when replicating earlier material. Clarity and darkness, honesty and wilful obscurity are tumbled together: the work of a writer who knows that the truths of the heart are hideously complicated, sees them with angry dispassion, yet is still enmired in their 'dark pit'.

In this section of the book, the 'fierce, unforgiving adamant child' of Under My Skin is resurrected again, hating her damaged parents for their intolerable helplessness and swearing she will not be like them. But the 'monstrous legacy' she bears is that she too has fallen into the pattern of damaged and damaging mothers: Lessing abandoned her own first two children (although this is not mentioned in Alfred and Emily).

Rewriting the past is a work of escape, an urgent but never-ending imperative, but one in which closure is always impossible. That, perhaps, is why Alfred and Emily reads both like the tail-end of an earlier work, and work-in-progress.